Hughes v. City Of New York
- Vyskocil
- 1:18-cv-09380
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 10
In Hughes v. City Of New York, Judge Vyskocil denied reconsideration and awarded Hughes $23,480 in fees and $323 in costs.
Vardell Hughes received $23,480 in attorney’s fees and $323 in costs; the City of New York’s reconsideration motion was denied, and the case was closed.
What happened
In Hughes v. City Of New York, the court considered the City’s request to reconsider an earlier order that granted part of Vardell Hughes’s request for sanctions because evidence had been lost. The earlier order involved deleted officer photographs and missing 911 calls and radio transmissions.
The City argued that Hughes was not harmed, that he should have acted to preserve the evidence, and that the evidence might have helped the defense. The court rejected those arguments, stating that the extra costs Hughes incurred because of the lost evidence were a form of harm and that the City had the duty to preserve potentially relevant evidence.
Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil denied the reconsideration motion and granted Hughes’s application for attorney’s fees. The court awarded his lawyer $23,480 for 58.7 hours at $400 per hour, plus $323 in costs, and directed the Clerk to close the case.
The detailed version
- Hughes v. City Of New York · No. 1:18-cv-09380
- Vyskocil
- Aug. 31, 2022
Background
The court had previously granted in part Vardell Hughes’s cross-motion for sanctions based on the defendants’ failure to preserve evidence. The earlier order required the defendants to pay expenses Hughes reasonably incurred because certain evidence was lost, including photographs on a responding officer’s cell phone and 911 calls and radio transmissions related to the incident.
The City of New York moved for reconsideration of that earlier order. Hughes separately applied for attorney’s fees and costs, initially requesting $25,403 and permission to supplement the request for work opposing the reconsideration motion.
Motion for Reconsideration
The court explained that reconsideration is an extraordinary remedy generally reserved for an overlooked controlling decision or fact, an intervening change in law, new evidence, clear error, or manifest injustice. It is not a way to relitigate arguments already presented.
The City argued that sanctions were improper because Hughes could not show that the lost evidence affected his false-arrest and malicious-prosecution claims. The court rejected that argument, holding that the additional expenses Hughes incurred trying to address the missing evidence constituted prejudice supporting sanctions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e).
The City also argued that Hughes knew the evidence existed but failed to tell the City to preserve it. The court found that this argument had already been made and could not be relitigated through reconsideration. The court further stated that the City—not Hughes—had the obligation to place a litigation hold on potentially relevant evidence after receiving Hughes’s Notice of Claim on January 8, 2018.
Finally, the City argued that the missing evidence would have helped the defense rather than Hughes. The court called that position speculative and stated that the City’s belief about the evidence’s usefulness did not remove its preservation duty. The court therefore denied the City’s motion for reconsideration.
Attorney’s Fees and Costs
The court used the lodestar method, which calculates a presumptively reasonable fee by multiplying reasonable hours by a reasonable hourly rate. Hughes’s lawyer, Cyrus Joubin, requested a rate of $400 per hour. The court found that rate reasonable based on his experience and comparable rates in the district.
Joubin’s time records showed 62.7 hours spent on the spoliation issues. The court excluded four hours related to a subpoena for New York Police Department evidence-preservation policies, sustaining the City’s objection to that time. It rejected the City’s objections to 3.2 hours spent preparing for and conducting the deposition of a former 911 dispatcher, finding that the deposition was reasonably related to interpreting a report used as a substitute for the erased 911 recording. The court also overruled the City’s remaining objections to the recorded time.
The court approved $323 for the 911 dispatcher’s deposition transcript. It awarded Joubin $23,480 in attorney’s fees based on 58.7 hours at $400 per hour, plus $323 in costs. The court granted Hughes’s application for attorney’s fees and directed the Clerk to terminate the relevant docket entries and close the case.
Disposition
The order is a procedural ruling on reconsideration and an ancillary fee application. It does not decide the underlying false-arrest or malicious-prosecution claims.
Read the full 10-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.